It’s happening on college campuses all across the country: the same multi-stage, highly gendered hookup. Sociology professor Lisa Wade breaks it down in her engaging, illuminating study, “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus”:

Step 3: Initiate a hookup: Turn to face the guy grinding on you (if you’re a woman, and you’ve received hand gestures from your friends that indicate that the guy is hookup-worthy.)

Step 4: Do ... something: Anything from kissing to full-on sex. The term “hookup” is ambiguous that way.

Step 5: Establish meaninglessness: The hardest step, according to Wade, who further breaks this step down:

Step 5-A: Be (or claim to be) plastered: “If students are being careless,” writes Wade, “they can’t be held responsible for what they did, but neither can they be held responsible for who they did.”

Step 5-B: Cap your hookups: Multiple hookups with the same person could lead that person (usually the woman, men stereotypically fear) to “catch feelings” and think a relationship is forming.

Step 5-C: Create emotional distance: “The rule,” writes Wade, “is to be less close after a hookup, at least for a time.” And “plenty of students feel uncomfortable with this proposition, but hookup culture has a way of enforcing compliance.” Compliance, and often unkindness.

Wade notes that even though the hookup is supposedly “a fun, harmless romp,” it has “oddly strict parameters. It’s spontaneous, but scripted. ... It is, in short, a feat of social engineering.”

Wade offers brief but fascinating looks into the history of courtship in America and the history of the American college that, taken together, helped engineer today’s campus culture. She writes, “If the young people living it up in cities in the 1920s are the hookup generation’s ideological grandparents, the gay men of the 1970s might be their two dads.”

Although it owes much to feminism and gay liberation, however, most campus hookup culture is not very woman-friendly and tends to be predominantly heteronormative, as well as predominantly white, exclusionary for students of color, working-class students, queer students, disabled and neurologically different students, and women whose bodies don’t fit a narrow definition of “hot.”

Not all students actively hook up — Wade divides students into “abstainers,” “dabblers,” “strivers” and “enthusiasts,” with enthusiasts making up less than a quarter of all students studied — and statistically, students aren’t having any more sex than their parents did at their age; still, no student is safe from hookup culture, which Wade calls an “occupying force,” a force that fosters cruelty, pits women against one another and divorces students from their emotions so profoundly, many of them feel numb.

“Enthusiasts” find hookup culture freeing, fun and empowering, but for many others, it can lead to depression, isolation and self-doubt, as well as, most disturbingly, sexual assault. Wade notes that hookup culture is “a rape culture, a set of ideas and practices that naturalize, justify, and glorify sexual pressure, coercion, and violence.”

Wade doesn’t often inject herself into the narrative, but this is no dry, academic study — her lively, natural voice comes through in lines like, “So, yeah, there’s an orgasm gap on college campuses” when she discusses the privileging of men’s pleasure, and “Welcome to dating, kids! It’s a thing grownups do that is weird and miserable” when she discusses her students’ difficulty in transitioning from hooking up to dating after graduation.

It’s clear she cares deeply for, and worries about, her students. And she’s no puritan; she has a sex-positive approach, and wants her students to be able to have fun, safe, satisfying sex, if they choose to partake. She wants the same for all of us.

For this study isn’t just about the bubble of college campuses — what she’s writing about affects our wider culture, too. “The corrosive elements of hookup culture are in all of our lives,” Wade writes. “In our workplaces, in our politics and the media, within our families and friendships, and, yes, in bars and bedrooms. ... It makes no sense, then, to shake our fingers at college students. They are us. If we want to fix hookup culture, we have to fix American culture.”

When we have a new president who has exhibited the worst of hookup culture — a culture where groping and denigrating “locker room talk” about women are normalized — it feels all the more imperative for us to transform hookup culture into a sexual culture that is more inclusive, more equal in its distribution of pleasure, more kind. “Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, change has to happen collectively,” Wade reminds us. “American Hookup” is an important wake-up call.